Things that you DO miss from "the good ol' days".

[pitz]

We have another thread on the stuff you don't miss from "the good ol' days". What about the things that you do miss?

I'll start:

a) English-speaking tech support *always*. None of this half English, garbled VoIP from somewhere overseas nonsense that passes for tech support these days.
b) High salaries/compensation/stock options if you worked in the technology industry, or even worked with computers period.
c) Being able to fit an entire operating system onto a 5.25" 360k floppy disk.
d) The excitement of being the first in your peer group to learn exciting new technologies such as the Internet.
e) Usenet without it being overrun by spammers or people wanting to share illegal pornography or other binaries. Direct access to some of the pre-eminent scientists in their respective fields.
f) The ability to build your own hardware and interface it with a computer using relatively unsophisticated digital logic, and no surface mount hardware.

 

[Paperdoc]

Full-detail manuals. Sure, I know the digital files now used for manuals save paper, have indexes, and are searchable - all progress. But in making that change the producers often cheaped out and did NOT provide the full information that used to be part of a manual. So even with fancy search tools, you can't find what's not there.

 

[acheron]

Fast start up times. I could boot in a few seconds, and start up e.g. WordPerfect 5.1 or earlier practically instantly. Now I consider it blazing fast if I can boot up in a minute (and my work computer that I can't streamline as much takes 10 minutes... I know that's not necessarily the computer's fault, just the fault of my company's IT department, but can you imagine a 386 taking 10+ minutes to start up?), and it still takes Word or OpenOffice awhile to load into memory and be ready.

Other than that, everything else has been covered (manuals, yes), other than the long list of things I miss out of nostalgia, but don't "really" miss.

 

[kalrith]

I miss a lack of spyware, phishing, pharming, etc. It used to be just good ol' viruses and hacking that we had to ward against.

I also miss the rampant increase in performance and decrease in cost of PCs. It seemed like an upgrade every 3 years more than doubled the performance at a cost reduction of 50%. Obviously performance is still increasing and prices still decreasing but at a much slower rate than in the 90s and early 2000s.

 

[mmntech]

I miss a lack of spyware, phishing, pharming, etc. It used to be just good ol' viruses and hacking that we had to ward against.

I also miss the rampant increase in performance and decrease in cost of PCs. It seemed like an upgrade every 3 years more than doubled the performance at a cost reduction of 50%. Obviously performance is still increasing and prices still decreasing but at a much slower rate than in the 90s and early 2000s.

I remember back when all Norton did was scan floppies for viruses. Lack of spam and advertising on your computer was also a big plus. And most important of all, there was no invasive DRM, if it was there at all!

 

[klocwerk]

Yeah, I miss running without AV software...

I also miss the google of old. It used to be easy to dredge up obscure stuff with the right keywords, now they do so much "smart analysis" of their indexes that it's nearly impossible to find the shadier corners of the web with the really interesting stuff.

Ebay before it got huge and mostly commercial resellers.

Autoexec.bat and config.sys.
It's so much harder to dig around under the hood these days.

The crazy pace of innovation in the mid to late 90's when the sky (and Moore's law) was the limit.

edit: Oh, and the huge old Computer Shopper magazines with millions of cheap mail-order parts ads.
And sketchy dial-in BBS servers.

 

[lxskllr]

Manuals are about it. Computers have gotten better in just about every measurable way. There's some nostalgia associated with manually configuring everything, but I don't miss it at all.

 

[PsiStar]

I miss doing a demonstration of the internet to a VP ... an "archie" search for the "PA9000", a high end HP processor of the day.()

Instead I get PA 9000 ... Pamela Anderson in the buff. RIP Geocities:\

 

[NoQuarter]

Code wheel copy protection on games

 

[VirtualLarry]

Fast start up times. I could boot in a few seconds, and start up e.g. WordPerfect 5.1 or earlier practically instantly.

You're kidding, right? Watching teh BIOS slowly count through 640KB of memory, three damn times, was excruciating.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, I miss running without AV software...

I also miss the google of old. It used to be easy to dredge up obscure stuff with the right keywords, now they do so much "smart analysis" of their indexes that it's nearly impossible to find the shadier corners of the web with the really interesting stuff.

You mean, before Google started to explicitly CENSOR their indexes.

 

[JechtShot]

Call me weird but the sound of MIDI in classic DOS games.

 

[one30eight]

DFI Street and my Socket A XP-M. Toaster!!

 

[Eeqmcsq]

Hmm, for hardware, it's hard to miss anything as technology advances and gets better. I miss CPUs that can be cooled by a heatsink only, so it's nice and quiet.

I miss when the web was simple, mostly text and images, and also before it got really popular and the idiots of the world joined in to make noise, before companies hopped on to make a buck, and before lawyers stepped in to shut down sites.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Maybe not hardware related, but I miss the big game boxes and large, full colour manuals. Remember the StarCraft manual? The backstory section was a book in itself.

These days the manual is more of a quick install guide than a manual.

 

[Tsavo]

Call me weird but the sound of MIDI in classic DOS games.

The only good sound card CL ever made: The Awe 64.

Made for MIDI!

 

[WinGeek]

I miss days when my own system carries only mini softwares like Designer, paint and Logo and all burden i had that time was to make best painting than my siblings.. I miss when i was only 5 -6 years

 

[rudder]

Having the feeling of awesomeness that came with playing Doom for the first time. Now graphics innovation is expected and many times takes a front seat to the story line or gameplay.

 

[Paperlantern]

Having the feeling of awesomeness that came with playing Doom for the first time. Now graphics innovation is expected and many times takes a front seat to the story line or gameplay.

Agreed! I still play doom, and these days it looks amazing! All still the same game!

As for the comment about being able to run without AV, I still don't need it, so nothing to miss there.

I miss DOS, being able to start a game with a command line instead of a double click.

 

[mmntech]

Call me weird but the sound of MIDI in classic DOS games.

Three words: LucasArts Adventure Games

 

[tommo123]

DFI Street and my Socket A XP-M. Toaster!!

ooh flashback! didnt one of the admins or the owner freak out or something?

 

[hkklife]

Yeah, the early days of E-Bay (and the various FS/FT forums including AT) were positively fantastic.

I miss being able to build a decently spec'd PC that was better than what was being sold in the shops AND save some $ in the process!

I also miss bundled OS restore discs that were devoid of bloatware.

Lavish game packaging & documentation is definitely right up there.

I miss PDAs as well. There were so many devices to choose from and you could almost even to afford annually without breaking the bank. Try doing that in this day of depreciating, heavily subsidized smartphones & 2yr contracts!

Oh, and the THICK magazines that were a dime a dozen back then. I remember buying the biggest-ever issue of PC Gamer (Dec '97 IIRC) and it was about as heavy as an issue of Vogue or something. I also miss the old Computer Shopper. I still have one of the very last of the "big" issue versions in my office that I keep around as a conversation piece.

I miss eagerly awaiting the latest magazines to read about new tech, new games AND see what surprise was in store for each month's cover disc. Remember when we could actually get free full-version games (Duke Nukem 3d was one) on the cover disc??

 

[sswingle]

I remember back when all Norton did was scan floppies for viruses. Lack of spam and advertising on your computer was also a big plus. And most important of all, there was no invasive DRM, if it was there at all!

I remember back when Norton was just a file manager.

 

[zerocool84]

Hmm, for hardware, it's hard to miss anything as technology advances and gets better. I miss CPUs that can be cooled by a heatsink only, so it's nice and quiet.

There's many cup's that can be cooled only with a heatsink.

 

[Rifter]

There's many cup's that can be cooled only with a heatsink.

yup, i mean if you really want to get technical almost ALL current CPU's could be cooled with a heatsink only, if it was large enough.... maybe about the size of a 32" CRT TV